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Friday, March 25, 2011

We didn't finish our master bedroom before we moved. We put it on the back burner and it pretty much contained our mattress set and leftover hand-me-down furniture. However, we did do some work to it so I thought I would post about it.

When we moved in, we didn't particularly like the extremely rough plaster walls but we thought we might be able to live with them.

The main wall that troubled us was this one. It was covered with bead board that bulged in the middle and was the only wall with crown moulding. We decided to take it down to investigate and found that the bead board was concealing a large hole in the plaster from an old stove vent. Since we were going to replace that wall we went ahead with gutting the whole room. This is where our house project took the sharp turn from replacing only the bathroom walls to replacing all of the walls.

The house had hardwoods throughout which had been badly refinished in the living/dining rooms and covered with carpet in the hallway and bedrooms. The carpet in the hallway was also covering an old floor furnace which felt like it was about to fall through every time you stepped on that area. We took up the carpet and planned to refinish the old hardwoods. However, we decided there were too many damaged places in the house for us to salvage them. Every single room in the house has significant damage to the floor joists, sill, and flooring (although we made that call after I had already spent hours using chemical stripper on our bedroom floors and making myself sick from the fumes on several occasions). Oh well, you live you learn. After doing some research and figuring out we wanted to go with BLC's pre-finished solid hickory (Cottage grade), Dave went to work.

Before Dave put down the hardwoods he had to fix some major issues under the flooring. Some of the subfloor had to be replaced and he had to make a temporary wall structure to remove some of the wood under the wall and replace it as well.

Some joists were no longer connected to the sill due to rot and were badly in need of repair.

Once all the walls and floors were finished we could tackle the closets. The closets in both bedrooms were decent sizes (especially for the age of the house) but the tiny doors didn't allow them to be efficiently used.

We decided to take out part of the wall and add French doors (left).

We added a closet system and made the space much more useful.

Though it would have been nice to complete the bedroom renovation it was just nice to have a real bedroom to sleep in during my pregnancy. We were previously sleeping in the other bedroom with our second mattress and box spring propped against the wall, boxes everywhere, our clothes in piles, and barely enough walking space to get to the bed. I think it's good to go through times like that to make us thankful for the times we do have order and comfort.